Why the ability to understand spoilers is perceptive media interesting

https://twitter.com/Jordan94jb/status/636896487981600768/

Most people don’t really care about spoilers till they are spoiled by somebody or something they read. Its incredibly frustrating to not know something and be in that state of wonder then somebody break it for you. There are many great spoilers out there like, the ending of lost, breaking bad, etc. I remember joking but with a quite a harsh tone for friend and family in hospital not to tell me the end of Lost.

The problem is with all the media channels we have, its more difficult to put yourself in a bubble and discover the media conclusion in your own way. This is something others have thought about a lot and this chrome extension is a interesting take on the problem, unfortunally it only works within the Trakt.tv site.

Trakt.tv but without the spoilers. Titles, screenshots and comments are all able to be obscured by this extension. This extension aims to prevent as many spoilers as possible on Trakt.tv with very customisable options.

Ok nice but whats this got to do with Perceptive Media?

Perceptive Media is most effective when there is a semantic understanding of the narrative, plot arcs and implicit desires of the audience.

With spoilers, if you knew where the audience was up to and how long ago they watched it (both Trakt.tv can do). You can infer what to hold back from them, so they are not spoiled of the next big surprise or twist. You can also let the stuff which isn’t important or seen already pass the filter instead of trying to hold it all back and frustrating the audience.

Basically spoiler prevention paves the way to a understanding of media in the way needed for perceptive media. Today its titles, screeenshots and comments. Tomorrow its popups, adverts, etc. In future how about parts of the news, articles, posts, parody, references to plot twists, etc…?

A review of my 2014 resolutions

Its been quite a year for me, the odd google plus video above is just a tiny slice of my hectic but great year.

This year I thought I would do  something a little different following metadating and another year of the quantified self. Following a bit of a twitter chat with Herb and Zoe, I thought I’d give Stephen Wolfram a run for his money (not!) Here’s some of what happened this year.

I  spent 6 days, 10 hours, 50 minutes watching 213 episodes over the past year.

I spent 1 week, 2 days, 19 hours, 35 minutes watching 111 movies over the past year.

Top 10 artists I listen to this year…

  1. Digital Italic
  2. Twit.tv
  3. Mauro Picotto
  4. Placebo
  5. Marco V
  6. Simon Patterson
  7. Gaia
  8. 2 Many DJ’s
  9. Sander Van Doorn
  10. Ferry Corsten

So how did I do on last years resolutions?

Baking a cake

  1. Go to a new part of the world
    Yeah this didn’t happen unless you count north Wales as a different part of the world. Unfortunately the holiday to Jamaica didn’t happen when my parents moved house. I’m already looking at Tokyo prices for 2015.
  2. Use my Task list more
    Success, I certainly used it a lot more but I could still do with better ways to do offline tasks. I am intrigued about the differences between using task to remember stuff and tasks to refer to stuff.
  3. Bake a bloody cake
    Ahhhh! The cake is not a lie… Well Sarah’s Banana bread/loaf suggestion may did happen while I was down in Bristol with my parents. Yes its easier but frankly it removes the temptation to bake Victoria sponge’s all the time. Following instructions or a recipe is something I always found painful. However I’m finally going to remove it from my list! Not to say I won’t ever make one again.
  4. Ride the bloody Smiler
    Not only have I rode the smiler this year, I think in total I have done 16+ times (sorry I lost count of how many times now, should be quantifying my rides) and boy oh boy have I loved it. The longest wait must be 1 hour 20mins in the single riders queue. Next year I’m considering get another yearly pass because its been great fun riding in Alton Towers and Thorpe Park when it was April and May.
  5. Improve my circus skills
    This year was ideal for circus skills but I rarely went out and did any. I did make it to the Cholton Circus house event once and its in my calendar now at least. Maybe next year?
  6. Move away from GoDaddy
    I’m fully away from Godaddy. Moved my blog, emails and domain to hover and WPengine. Another one marked off the list.
  7. Surround myself in higher thinking
    This is certainly happening, I generally don’t watch much live transmitted TV anyway but this year I’m watching far far less. Generally I’m watching either on-demand TV shows or something educational from Youtube. The chromecast has helped with this I have to say, Xbmc is cool but the chromecast has made the process super simple. My podcast listening has increased too with things like Freakonomics. I also messed with my twitter followers a little, so generally I’m getting higher thinking stuff. My ianforrester account follows all my friends instead.
  8. Scooter into another country
    So May/June was amazing. I did the simple option of driving through Wales, although the mountains were incredible. but I clocked up 403 miles during that trip alone. Myself and Oli Wood are talking about doing something next year, so expect to hear more soon.
  9. Use social media to stay in touch with friends
    I started off well but then kind of lost my way in the middle of the year. I guess removing Facebook from my phone was always going to cause a issues and not enough friends use other platforms daily. I did do a little social experiment to see what I should do next year, around a Christmas card on G+ and FB.
  10. Pick up the family genealogy
    With the help of Sarah, my insane family tree is on genealogy.co.uk. I can’t believe how much they charge but we have identified quite a few of the family who are already using it and could take it onwards.
  11. Live the life I choose
    Dave commented on my thoughts about the hyperconnected world we are heading into.

    As I believe in the hyper-connected world we’re moving into. My bets are against hierarchy and traditional. Maybe there is a word which sums this up?

    My assumption would be something like dynamic linking. However Dave suggests that word I’m looking for is Heterarchy.
    …enough i hear you cry, how did it go this year?

    So this year I stuck to my principles and I believe are seeing signs which are fruitful. I reached out for better advice to better manage and use my dyslexia to further my own career. Also next year will be the 5 year anniversary of mybrushwithdeath.

  12. Sort out my love life and finish the book
    Been put myself out there and attended many weird and wonderful events. I also started dating different women again, hey you never know (opposites attract?) The book is still being written (slowly) but its more difficult as the dates I been on in 2014 have not been anywhere as bad, I’m also trying to remember some of the older dates. I could make up drama but everything to date has been written on top of the truth.

Banana bread

TV Tracking done correctly

TV tracking with trakt.tv

At last the almost perfect TV tracker has been realised by the guys behind Trak.tv.

I say almost perfect because it doesn’t seem to support the social aspect of what tioti was planning. Trak.tv isn’t far off and i’m not totally sure if it doesn’t have it yet. I don’t have any friends on Trak.tv yet, so that might be the thing holding it all back. Time to ping my friends, I think.

The other thing which I think is a little painful is having to select that you watched previous episodes. You could assume that if I watched episode 3 of season 4 of Breakin Bad. It could assume I’d seen the previous ones but then again I guess it would be wrong to assume.

Anyhow, its excellent to see this being developed in the background and xbmc getting really into the quantified self movement

Full TV tracker with trakt.tv

XBMC dharma goes online

In a surprise (surprising to me at least) move to XBMC there is now a couple of services which allow you to show off your collection to the awaiting public. Something a little like Boxee does but much more like Last.FM (or rather Audioscrobbler) does.

Trakt.TV

The first one is Trakt.TV which simply tracks what you watch, just like last.FM/Audioscrobbler but for TV and Film. Of course its still early days, so theres not a lot of data right now but the database is powered by other open source projects the movie database and the TV database. Of course the scobbler plugin is built directly into the new Dharma XBMC, but you can force it into Camelot too if you don’t want to upgrade quite yet. One of the nice settings in the plugin is the ability to only send a update when you watch a certain percentage of the film/TV show. And of course you can blacklist certain directorys if you want to protect your p0rn for example. You can imagine the Lol’s when someone finds your secret stash of p0rn on the site. Credit is certainly due to trakt.tv for the global stats and chart pages, alas OKtrends.

Oh by the way my profile is here but its quite empty right now because I’ve not been watching anything from my xbmc library today.

Share the TV

Share the TV is the next one which aims to be less like Trakt.TV and more like a place to just dump your whole movie collection. Like Trakt.TV theres a plugin directly in the new XBMC and its just a matter of enabling it. Also like Trakt theres a load of options you can configure so its only uploading you collection every once in a while. Unlike Trakt, share the TV uploads the whole of your current movie and TV database to the site. So ideally you can show your friends what you got. Its also powered by the movie database which is a nice touch.

My profie is here again.

The crux of the issue

I like both of them but its very handy being able to see the whole collection with sharetheTV. I do worry somewhat that someone will look at my collection and decide that a film which isn’t out yet is obviously pirated (Grow up people!) (I tend to download a lot of trailers of course and XBMC picks up the metadata for them). I would really like to see trakt.tv and sharethetv come together to form a much stronger single site really.

Nothings perfect but theres room for change in both. Being able to change the update perious is useful in sharethetv because for example, Notorious auto scans as the 1946 film with the same name. So I need to change it before it syncs up the cloud.

Its great they both use the open movie/tv sites but it would be great if in turn they would also provide a export option for your own data collected. I’m sure there both working on it but sooner rather that later. I’d also like to see the ability to embed your collection elsewhere (actually trakt does support basic embeding). I’ve been burned on this front before with myfilmz.net.

Finally it would be great if either site could solve the problem which was highlighted by tape it off the internet (or tioti.com which is now findmetv.com) When your watching a TV series such as for example The Event. Some friends are following the UK Channel4 series, some are downloading it and some are waiting for the boxset. It would be fantastic to be able to track all that in a simple web/gui.